Product description

Replete with color photographs, drawings, and maps of Viking sites, artifacts, and landscapes, this book celebrates and explores the Viking saga from the combined perspectives of history, archaeology, oral tradition, literature, and natural science. The book's contributors chart the spread of marauders and traders in Europe as well as the expansion of farmers and explorers throughout the North Atlantic and into the New World. They show that Norse contacts with Native American groups were more extensive than has previously been believed, but that the outnumbered Europeans never established more than temporary settlements in North America.

Author information

WILLIAM W. FITZHUGH is the director of the Arctic Studies Center and curator in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. ELISABETH WARD is a curatorial specialist of the Vikings exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Review quote

"This stimulating work gives the Vikings the place they deserve in the history of the world and will repay both extensive study and casual browsing."--"Publishers Weekly"